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[Library Eye]

I am for first time trying to use MediaCenter to sync to a handheld on a Mac. Considering JRiver's focus on users with local data, not streaming, and considering everyone willing to pay for a desktop music library program has probably got a smartphone, what would be ideal would be a JRiver mobile app that is made to sync with your local library, and could share some kinda database like with an old iPod (which works in Windows, last time I checked) so as to even keep track of statistics like play count. Not sure it’d would be worth it for JRiver to develop that. Plus, for macOS and Android, this would require JRiver to build an MTP driver into MediaCenter. This would be a mobile app I'd be happy to pay for, but I don't expect it. I imagine it is far more complicated than I just made it sound. And old iPods, despite being pretty much frozen in time now, frustratingly do not work on a Mac with MediaCenter.

So, what I have turned to is running Rockbox on an old iPod. There are so many various little troubles that I am not sure I will continue, but for now I have overcome a couple issues I am still sorting through and which – if I become more certain of my solutions – I will come back and share here.

For now, here's one major problem that I encountered yesterday. When I went looking for answers in Mac forums here, I just found the problems (users with different devices) but no answer. Keeping in mind that JRiver is really a Windows program and that's where more of the development and more of the user base is, i went through Windows forums here, lifted some code, and hacked away at it till I got what I think is a solution.

The problem: JRiver will not know when it has completed a sync of a track to a handheld if any "special" characters are in use in the name. Also, by the way, the tracks it has already synced, at least in my setup, don't show in the handheld's playlist, as viewed from JRiver or the handheld. So, JRIver keeps showing the track on your desktop as queued, and may show a second copy as ready to be deleted on sync, and may copy yet another one next time you try, on and on.

I discovered this issue not with any special characters, but with the simple period. Right, just an old "." anywhere in naming is trouble. I guess JRiver is seeing what follows the period as an extension for a file type it can't handle.

I wanted to be able to replace these characters all with an underscore, but I could only get that syntax right if I was only concerned with a single problematic character. I know nothing about coding, like I said, I totally hacked this together. And, since there is more than one trouble character, instead, I am just removing them in the file names. The names don't matter, at least not in my setup; the metadata keeps the full names.

So let's say "." has caused me trouble, which it has. And let's say "ü" and "é" have too, which they have. And lets say for good measure I want to avoid
/
and
&
and
’

and that I want the files to land in a "Music" folder on the handheld device following a subfolder structure using JRiver's "[Album Artist (auto)]" field and "[Album]" field, and I want the handheld's folders to avoid those characters.


Well, then, in Media Center's
Tools>Options>Handhelds>Files, Paths, & More
menu
I would enter into Audio Path field:
Music/RemoveCharacters([Album Artist (auto)], /&.’úé)\RemoveCharacters([Album], /&.’úé)\

and to avoid same characters in file names, using track number and title as naming scheme,  in Media Center's
Tools>Options>Handhelds>Files, Paths, & More
menu
I would enter into Audio Filename Rule field:
[Track #]-RemoveCharacters([Name], /&.’úé)

There it is. For any other trouble characters, you can go back and add in later. I would throw ‘em in between the ü and the é for ease of reference.

[Library Eye]

(If you have any trouble with any of those characters as I pasted them above, try copying and pasting the trouble character(s) from within the tags as seen in JRiver)